The eye-tracking headgear isn't necessary to train your own dog. Credit: Christoph VlterShareThere are plenty of strategies to train your dog, but is there a particularly effective method to get your pet pal to pay attention to you? A team of scientists believes the most successful technique likely involves combining two tried-and-true signalsand they gathered data from canines strapped with eye-tracking headgear to back up their theory.Dog owners frequently try communicating with their pets by looking or pointing directly at an object, but a team at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna recently wondered if either method (or a combination of the two) worked best. Led by comparative cognition postdoctoral candidate Christoph Vlter, researchers introduced various communication scenarios to dogs to learn the answer.To evaluate the best human-to-dog strategy, a researcher first sat on their knees with a bowl on either side of them, only one of which contained a concealed treat. They then offered dogs five different scenarios repeated six times each: pointing, pointing and gazing, gazing, mimicking a ball throw, and a no-cue control. Each dogs eye movement was then tracked to record how often they followed the gestures, followed by whether or not they heeded the commands.While their test group originally included nearly 30 subjects, not every dog was thrilled to sport the ski goggle-like eye-tracking headgear.[ Related: A visit to dog college ]Three dogs did not accept the goggles and two dogs were too aroused when they were in the testing rooms, they explained in their study published on February 12th in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.Ultimately, however, Vlter and colleagues settled on 20 amenable dogs consisting of eight mixed breeds along with four terriers, two Australian shepherds, two poodles, and a single collie, flat coated retriever, German shepherd, and Rhodesian Ridgeback.Six dogs performed significantly above chance in the pointing-gazing condition, while three dogs correctly chose the treat bowl all six times during the pointing scenario. Conversely, none of the dogs performed noticeably above chance in the other conditions.Our results show a clear difference in how dogs reacted to the directional but non-referential throwing cue compared with the referential hand gestures, the study authors wrote. While all cues including hand movements reliably prompted dogs to look to the side (unlike the referential gaze cue), only when presented with a pointing gesture did dogs redirect their gaze from the experimenters hand to the designated bowl.Despite the empirical evidence supporting the pointing-gazing combos efficacy, researchers stopped short of claiming dogs definitely understand their owners communication cues as we perceive them.Is it for them more like an imperative directive to go somewhere? Or do they understand it more in a communicative way? Vlter said in an accompanying statement on Wednesday.Vlter and his collaborators believe more study into the field of natural pedagogy is required to definitively answer that question. In the meantime, however, they say their research may support similar approaches to teaching younger children the names of everyday objects.

Illustration: View from inside a detector building block of detection units. Clearly visible the yellow buoy of a near by detection unit. (KM3NeT)Credit: KM3NeT / Edward Berbee/Nikhef ShareOf all the fundamental particles that make up the standard model of particle physics, neutrinos remain the most enigmatic. Theyre virtually weightlessbut not quite! They carry no electric charge and almost never interact with other particles. They dont even seem to have a fixed identity, instead oscillating constantly between their three different flavors. Theyre streaming through your body as you read thisthe sun is constantly producing colossal quantities of thembut detecting them remains difficult, and theres still a great deal we dont know about them.Neutrinos are very mysterious particles, says Damien Dornic, one of the co-authors of a new paper published February 12 in Nature that describes the detection of the decay products of an extremely high energy neutrino by the Kilometer Cubed Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT), a neutrino detector located deep beneath the Mediterranean Sea. Scientists calculate that the neutrino carried an energy of around 220 peta-electronvolts (PeV), making it the single most energetic neutrino ever observed. (220 PeV is an extraordinarily high energy: for comparison, the Large Hadron Collider collides particles at a maximum energy of 13.6 tera-electronvolts, which is just 0.006% of the neutrinos estimated energy; conversely, this means that the neutrino carried the energy of over 16,000 LHC collisions.)The neutrino itself was not observed directly; rather, its existence was implied from the detection of another particle called a muon, which lit up one of the two particle detectors on February 13, 2023. Scientists have spent the last two years examining the data and reconstructing the trajectory of the muon, concluding that it was created by the interaction between a matter particle and the ultra-high energy neutrino.While neutrinos remain extremely elusive, muons are both easier to detect and far better understood. They are often described as the electrons heavier cousin, becausebeyond some very subtle differences that remain the subject of active researchthey are almost identical to the familiar electron. Theres one key difference, however: a muons mass is some 200 times greater than that of an electron.This high mass makes muons unstable, and on average they decay into lighter particles after existing for less than two microseconds (a microsecond is one millionth of a second.) It might seem that this fleeting lifespan might also make muons hard to detect, but the effects of relativity mean that high-energy muons appear to us to exist far longer than this. The relativistic effects known as time dilation and length contraction basically mean that from our frame of reference, the faster a muon is traveling, the longer it takes to decay.Most muons detected on earth are produced by cosmic rays, which are high-energy particlesusually protonsthat can collide with particles in the Earths upper atmosphere, producing showers of exotic, short-lived particles when they do so. Muons produced in this manner are imbued with enough energy for some of them to reach the surface of the earth.However, the muon that struck the KM3NeT detector in 2023 cant have been one of these muons: unlike cosmic ray muons, which descend from above, it arrived on a nearly horizontal trajectory. The paper calculates that to reach KM3NeT in this manner, it must have travelled almost 100 miles through seawater and solid rocka much greater distance than is possible for a muon produced by a cosmic ray interaction. The immense energy required to propel this muon such a distance along this trajectory alerted scientists to the fact that it was unusualand suggested that its origins were similarly exotic.So where did it come from? What could possibly imbue a tiny, ghostly particle with such immense energy? It is only the most powerful sources in the Universe that are capable of producing such neutrinos, says Dornic. Active galactic nuclei, and in particular blazars, are particularly interesting [potential] sources. Gamma-ray bursts [from] starburst galaxies [could] also be candidates.The term active galactic nucleus (AGN) refers to the heart of a galaxy whose central supermassive black hole is actively consuming matter. The infalling material forms an accretion disk, and the resultant strong magnetic fields eject some of this matter at extremely high speed in jets that emerge from the poles of the black hole, perpendicular to the disk. Dornic explains that a blazar is an AGN with one special property: In blazars, the jet is pointing toward the Earth. This means that this high energy matterincluding, perhaps, the neutrino that came hurtling towards the Earth in February 2023is blasted straight at us.Dornic says that more research is needed into these extremely high energy neutrinos before any definitive statements can be made about their origin. However, he says, the detection of the neutrino described in Nature represents a landmark for astronomy: [Neutrinos] can be used to study the heart of the most cataclysmic sources in the Universe. They are really monsters, associated with the activities of supermassive black holes with masses or millions to billions of solar masses. With this ultra-high energy neutrino, we are opening a new window in our universe. [This is] the first stone of some super exciting future results.

A popular diabetes and weight-loss drug reduced peoples craving for drinking alcohol.The results, from the first clinical trial of its kind, suggest that semaglutide may hold promise as a treatment for problematic alcohol use. Semaglutide is sold as Ozempic and Wegovy.Some people have reported that this family of drugs, called GLP-1 agonists, curbs not just the desire to eat, but also to drink alcohol and smoke cigarettes. Data from mice, rats and nonhuman primates back that up. But clear evidence from people was lacking.The new study included 48 adults, all of whom had alcohol use disorder. None of the participants were seeking treatment for the disorder, which is estimated to have affected roughly 29 percent of United States adults at some point in their lives. Each volunteer was randomly assigned to receive weekly semaglutide injections or a placebo.At the beginning and end of the nine-week treatment period, participants came into a lab and were offered their preferred alcoholic drink. After receiving semaglutide, people drank less alcohol, clinical psychologist Christian Hendershot, of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and colleagues report February 12 in JAMA Psychiatry. In the lab-based drinking session at the end of the experiment, people who received the placebo drank just under 60 grams of alcohol on average; people on semaglutide drank about half that a little over 30 grams. A standard 12-ounce can of beer has about 14 grams of alcohol.Whats more, in the second half of the experiment, people on semaglutide reported drinking about 30 percent fewer drinks on the days they drank versus their baseline drinking habits. People on placebo dropped their drink count on drinking days only a smidge. That finding hints that semaglutide may lessen the amount of alcohol people drink, even if it doesnt stop them from drinking completely.The results appear promising, Hendershot says. Still, its best to view these numbers with caution. Larger studies over longer periods of time are needed to confirm and clarify the effects of GLP-1 drugs on peoples use of alcohol and other harmful substances, including tobacco and opioids.

A neutrino from space recently plunged into the Mediterranean Sea with an energy that blows all other known neutrinos out of the water.Packing a punch of some 220 million billion electron volts, this particle was around 20 times as energetic as the highest energy cosmic neutrinos seen before, researchers report in the Feb. 13 Nature. The particle was glimpsed by the partially built Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope, or KM3NeT.They hit the jackpot, says Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of WisconsinMadison and principal investigator of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica. We have been taking data with a much bigger detector for 10 years. Weve never seen such an event.Physicists are keen to catalog cosmic neutrinos because these lightweight, electrically neutral particles can cross vast stretches of space nearly undisturbed. The most energetic ones could offer unmatched insights into the powerful phenomena that spit them out, such as supermassive black holes. But netting particles that barely interact with matter requires giant telescopes made of sensors encased in ice, like IceCube, or submerged in water, like KM3NeT.KM3NeTs two neutrino detectors one off the coast of Sicily, the other near southern France are still under construction but already collecting data. Both contain cables hundreds of meters tall, which are strung with bundles of light sensors anchored to the seafloor.When cosmic neutrinos interact with matter in or near a KM3NeT detector, they spawn charged particles such as muons. As those muons careen through water, they give off feeble flashes of bluish light that KM3NeTs sensors can pick up. Clocking when different sensors spot this light can reveal a particles path; the brightness of the blue hue reflects the particles energy.On February 13, 2023, the detector near Sicily was run through by an extremely energetic muon traveling nearly parallel to the horizon. At the time, only 21 of the planned 230 sensor cables were in place. Based on the muons energy and trajectory, KM3NeT scientists determined it must have been spawned by a neutrino from space rather than a particle from the atmosphere.Simulations suggest the neutrinos energy was around 220 petaelectron volts. The previous record holder boasted around 10 petaelectron volts.Its a kind of shocking situation, says KM3NeT team member Luigi Antonio Fusco, a physicist at the University of Salerno in Fisciano, Italy. Its like neutrino physicists have only ever seen fires fueled by a few sticks of kindling, and then someone comes with a flamethrower. The KM3NeT researchers estimate that they expect to see a neutrino of this caliber once every 70 years or so.I definitely went in kind of skeptically, says Erik Blaufuss, a physicist at the University of Maryland in College Park who wrote a commentary on the study in the same issue of Nature. But they make a pretty convincing case in the paper that its real.To trace the neutrinos origins, the KM3NeT team scoured data from gamma ray, X-ray and radio telescopes. Twelve objects stood out in the region of the sky from whence the neutrino came. Most of them are active galactic nuclei, Fusco says bright cores of galaxies where supermassive black holes are guzzling gas and dust. The problem is that there are so many, he says. You cannot really pinpoint a single one.Another possibility is that this is the first observed cosmogenic neutrino, created when ultrahigh energy cosmic rays mingle with photons from the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the Big Bang.At this point, its very difficult to make conclusions about the origins, says Kohta Murase, a theoretical physicist at Penn State not involved in the research. Its dangerous to rely on one event.Sponsor MessageThe expansion of KM3NeT should improve its ability to nab neutrinos and pinpoint their origins. Other neutrino telescopes are also in the works, such as a planned expansion of IceCube, a proposed observatory off Canadas Vancouver Island and one under construction in the South China Sea. Those tools, Murase says, may help researchers home in on the birthplaces of neutrinos with staggeringly high energies.

Nature, Published online: 12 February 2025; doi:10.1038/s41586-024-08465-yA strategy is reported that improves the performance and lifetime of lithium-ion batteries by adding organic Li salt after assembly, which decomposes during cell formation, liberating Li ions and expelling organic ligands as gases.

Nature, Published online: 12 February 2025; doi:10.1038/s41586-024-08521-7In Arabidopsis, mechanisms for NRG1A activation by recognition of a modified host EDS1SAG101 complex, and NRG1A inhibition by NRG1C through sequestration of activated EDS1SAG101, show activation and constraint of a central plant immune response system.

Einstein predicted the existence of gravitationally-warped rings of light in 1915. Now, a new one has been discovered just a cosmic stone's throw from our own planet.

Researchers have discovered blow fly larvae with fake termite faces on their rears that enable them to socially integrate into termite colonies in the mountains of Morocco.

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